POLITICAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF WOMEN. 89 



tell us of an African king, whose standing army is of women — a 

 fierce and terrible array. 



It is even possible that in this judgment an effect has been 

 mistaken for a cause. Women have not been exempted from 

 military service on account of their congenital delicacy, but their 

 characteristic delicacy is the slow result of their exemption from 

 this and other hardships submitted to by men. 



Certain phenomena open to general observation warn us that 

 it will not do to trust too implicitly the permanence of natural 

 laws, and that physical structure and accompanying mental en- 

 dowments may be greatly modified by continued unfavorable 

 environments. Among certain orders — the bee, for example — sex 

 itself may be determined by a continuous special regimen and 

 diet, when the exigencies of the community require it. Aniong 

 domestic animals the cow, especially honored for the service ren- 

 dered to men by her maternal functions, has been exempted from 

 the yoke of labor and maintained in an indolent isolation of 

 respect nearly equal to that of the queen bee in the hive. The 

 result has been such a differentiation in bulk and build as almost 

 to declare a difference of species between herself and her congener 

 of the other sex. Among horses, sheep, and swine, a substantial 

 uniformity of regimen and discipline brings the two sexes into 

 physical conditions with no appreciable differences in size, form, 

 and strength. So, too, with the carnivora : a community of em- 

 ployment, of exposure, of activity in predaceous warfare, tends to 

 bring size, shape, and color into a uniformity of type, while among 

 other wild orders, like the stag, the greater bulk, the exaggeration, 

 of the parts serviceable in combats is clearly due to continuous 

 fighting assigned to the males alone. 



To what, then, must the anthropologist attribute that custom, 

 almost immemorial and universal, which savage and civilized 

 men have concurred in establishing, of exempting women from 

 the service of fighting ? To that which will be found to be the 

 spring and source of most of their customs and institutions — sen- 

 timent ; a sentiment in man of mingled pity, respect, and affec- 

 tion — a sentiment, like most others of somewhat low origin, be- 

 ginning, it may be, in selfishness and the promptings of instinct, 

 but flowering out in its complete evolution into a noble and divine 

 virtue. 



Facts of our own national history illustrate, if they do not 

 confirm, this judgment. Our civil war called out, as I have 

 already said, two thirds of the whole arms-bearing population of 

 one State, and probably the same proportion for all the North. It 

 called out three thirds of the arms-bearing people of the South. 

 The war ended simply because one section had, and the other had 

 not, a reserve of one third to fall back upon. Probably no two 



